Invasion: California Page 18

  “There, there, to your left,” a sergeant shouted in his ear via his helmet’s radio.

  Paul saw it, a Blue Swan launcher. It was big: the launch vehicle and the straight-up missile with twenty cables snaking from it. He wasn’t an expert, but the thing looked ready to fly. Several Chinese technicians—they wore blue overalls—argued as they stood by a command board. Chinese soldiers surrounded the techs. The enemy fired, spewing sparks from the muzzle of their assault rifles.

  Dirt spit around Paul. He grunted and flew backward as a round stuck him in the chest. Another whanged off his helmet and it was hard to think. Paul crawled behind a fuzzy burning object, thankful for his body armor.

  The pilot put us right on top of them. This is the craziest op I’ve ever been on.

  At that moment, their Cherokee blew up in a spectacular blast, creating several secondary explosions. The blast hit Paul in the back of the head and slammed him onto the ground. There was a roaring sound in his ears. It might have been him shouting, he didn’t know. Nothing made sense, just blurry motion and heat up and down his body. Why did his chest throb like that?

  The next thing Paul realized was him crawling, firing, crawling and firing again. He looked back. A Chinese soldier rushed Romo from the side. The Mexican Apache was toast. Before he thought things through, Paul swung his gun and fired, cutting down the enemy. Romo saw it, and there was something in his eyes. Maybe he realized Paul had just saved his life.

  The Chinese were doing a damn good job of defending the arguing techs. What was it with them anyway? Why didn’t they just fire their toy? It was always something.

  By crawling and eating dirt—Paul spit several times—he reached what had seemed at first like a perfectly good Chinese IFV. It wasn’t. There were neat little holes in it from gun rounds—those must have come from the Cherokee’s pilot. Enemy infantry lay in gory ruin around it. Some of them must have not worn body armor. That was stupid but fortunate. Paul thrust himself to his feet and raced into the cramped vehicle. He banged against a rail and bumped his head twice. Good thing he still wore his helmet. By releasing his rucksack, he climbed up into the cupola.

  With a savage grin, he drew back the bolt of its 12.7mm machine gun. He swiveled it around, sighted and pressed his thumbs on the butterfly triggers. The hammering sounds and the shivering of the gun was pure delight. He mowed down the soldiers guarding the technicians. Next, he shot the Chinese in blue overalls as they tried to run like mice. All was fair in war, right? Lastly, he poured bullet after bullet into the Blue Swam missile. Some of them were incendiary bullets. The freak had wanted to fly, huh. And it had wanted to broadcast its electromagnetic pulse on his fellow citizens.

  “No tonight, Johnny Boy,” Paul said under his breath.

  An explosion ended it as the missile’s fuel ignited. Paul slid down into the IFV and rolled himself into a fetal position. A second later, the thirty-ton IFV rocked violently, sending Paul tumbling around like a bowling ball. He didn’t see the very end. The missile fell like an axed tree on speed, hurling itself onto the soil and crumpling. The last Chinese died in a hail of Marine and Mexican assassin bullets.

  Soon thereafter, bullet silence allowed the survivors to hear the sound of roaring flames.

  Paul crawled out of the IFV. His head throbbed and he staggered as he walked. The enemy was dead and the missile destroyed. According to Paul’s count, including him, there were two Marines and two Free Mexico soldiers left alive behind enemy lines. One of the Mexicans—of course—was Romo. It was probably stupid to have saved the man’s life earlier.

  Was this act two between Romo and him? Or did the man still want to work together in order to get back to the good old U.S. of A?

  It was time to find out.

  FIRST FRONT HEADQUARTERS, MEXICO

  Marshal Nung groaned as he sat up. His eyesight was blotchy and breathing had become a chore. There was a painful knot on his head where he’d banged it on the floor.

  Medics hovered over him. One of them finished attaching an IV-drip to his arm.

  “General,” Nung said in a hoarse voice.

  A nervous General Pi glanced down at him. The man looked harried, out of his depth. At logistics, he was excellent. Making battlefield decisions—no, he would give command to Marshal Gang.

  “Help me stand,” Nung said in a hoarse voice.

  “Begging your pardon, Marshal,” the chief medic said, “but I suggest—”

  “I’ve given you an order,” Nung growled. Anger washed though him. A sharp pain in his head made him wince. His lung muscles locked up and he gasped.

  “Please, sir,” the medic said, kneeling beside him, rubbing his chest.

  With weak fingers, Nung grasped the medic’s arm. “Stand,” he managed to gasp. “Help me. I order you.”

  The medic stared at him, judging the odds perhaps at what would happen to him if he disobeyed. Finally, the medic nodded and motioned to his helpers. Together, the three medics helped Nung to his feet.

  “Report,” Nung whispered, as the pain in his head throbbed. Why was the chamber tilting and spinning?

  General Pi looked at him in horror. “Marshal, I recommend that you—”

  Even though it hurt, Nung shook his head. He knew now that he must leash his anger. He must maintain his composure or his body would betray him a second time. A catastrophe threatened. If Marshal Gang reported this…the Ruling Committee might summon him home. He knew what to do to win, and he must do it and show all of them that he was the greatest commander China possessed.

  First taking several calming breaths, Nung glanced at the computer map. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make any sense of it. It kept blurring, hurting his eyes.

  “Blue Swan,” Nung managed to say.

  General Pi licked his mouth, bobbing his head. “The missiles are about to launch, sir, although on an ad hoc basis. We lack full coordination, I’m afraid. I have ordered our fighter drones into California in order to clear the space and swamp American anti-air defenses. For the same reason, I am also in the process of launching cruise missiles.”

  Nung tried to gather his thoughts. It was like an old fisherman trying to draw a net too heavy with tuna. He lacked the strength. His willpower kept slipping. “Procedure,” he said.

  “I know, sir,” Pi said. “I’m trying to follow your plan. But it is chaos tonight. Some of the Blue Swan launchers have been destroyed.”

  “How…how many?” whispered Nung. This was terrible.

  “We’re still in the process of discovering that, sir.”

  Nung blinked several times. When did breathing become so difficult? He swayed, and the medics eyed each other.

  “Sit,” Nung told them. “There.” He tried to indicate with his chin. He was simply too weak to lift his arms to point.

  The medics moved him toward an open chair before a screen. Nung shuffled his feet. He felt so old, so desperately weak.

  “Rest,” Nung whispered.

  “Yes, sir,” the chief medic said. “You must rest here and gather your strength.”

  FORWARD EDGE OF THE BATTLE AREA, CALIFORNIA

  As the night progressed, the air battle went heavily against the Americans. The surviving V-10s retreated from Mexican air space, racing for home. The Chinese fighter drones followed, although most had already launched their air-to-air missiles and expended their cannon shells.

  Two American drones watched the battle from a great distance away near the stratosphere. Each had long, thin wings and many, black bubble canopies along the length of its fuselage. Hidden in each bubble was a sensor.

  The three satellites were drifting junk in the stratosphere, clusters of twisted metal.

  Then a Chinese strategic laser outside Monterrey, Mexico reached up and burned one of the high-flying drones, searing off a thin wing. There was hardly any noise this high up. The drone had drifted too near Mexican air space, but now it began a long tumble to the Earth below. That left one drone and three American AWACS hundreds of miles
behind the border.

  With the data from these sources, the JFC of California realized the Chinese were up to something. They had gone from defense to offense. Therefore, he gave the order. Waiting F-35s entered the fray.

  Major Max Grumman gritted his teeth as he signaled his acceptance of the order. He had been watching the air battle for the past half hour. Drones. He hated them. They took the glory out of air combat. The great aces of World War I and II, the Vietnam jet-jocks and the heroes of the Alaskan War, he’d read about them avidly. Like his fellow pilots, he knew that UCAVs could never replace the man on the spot in his fighter plane.

  The night was rich with stars and the ground was far below. Grumman banked and took the F-35 down.

  His screen lit up with targets. Look at them, drones by the dozen, small and lethal. They could turn tighter and take any Gs their operators gave them. Yeah, drones had advantages, but desk boys weren’t jet-jocks.

  “Little pricks,” Grumman said under his breath.

  He activated a Sun-stinger. It was a lovely new missile, the latest thing in the American arsenal.

  “You watching me through your cameras, desk-boy?” asked Grumman.

  He began the targeting sequence. One of them jittery, fast-flying little pricks, ah, right in his crosshairs.

  The F-35 shuddered as a Sun-stinger dropped loose from a wing. The heavy missile dropped and its engine ignited. The burn was a hard glow, and the missile zoomed into the night after its target.

  Grumman watched on his targeting HUD. The little prick, it moved quickly, the jittery bastard. Then, a winking light on his screen indicated a hit and a kill.

  Grumman’s gritted teeth turned into a faint smile as the Chinese drone ceased to exist. There were a million of them, though. This was like an old Star Wars movie. He shook his head, the edge of the oxygen mask pressing against his cheek. It was time to work, time to play the ultimate game. How could a desk-boy in Mexico City know anything about that?

  In quick succession, Grumman launched two more missiles, getting two more kills in less than a minute. That’s how you did it. That’s how you owned the sky.

  “It’s a turkey shoot!” he shouted over the radio.

  Even as he said it, he studied the operational screen. Look at that. Three kills and the Chinese pricks just kept on coming. Tonight, he was going to become an ace—five kills. He just needed two more now. A turkey shoot was the right place to be in order to enter the hall of air-ace heroes.

  Major Grumman might not have thought that if he’d known the Chinese plan. Like him, most of the F-35s fired their Sun-stingers, taking a dreadful toll of nearly dry—of offensive armament—enemy fighter drones.

  The drones bored in, firing their remaining air-to-air missiles and if they made it close enough, using up their last cannon shells.

  Grumman swore then.

  “J-25s,” the ground-control operator said in his headphones. “They’re coming up fast behind the drones.”

  The J-25 was the Chinese air-superiority fighter. Like sharks using a shoal of herring, they’d hidden behind the drones. The J-25s were armed, fresh and loaded for American pilots.

  Major Grumman’s stomach tightened as he heard the growl of his threat indicator. Enemy radar had locked onto him. He launched chaff, a decoy and looked up into the starry night. Something flashed toward him. It came as fast as an enemy missile. Then he realized the truth, saw it for just a moment.

  “Drone!” he snarled. Where had it come from? With his thumb, he readied his cannon.

  The drone’s cannon fired first, quick blooms of light at shutter-speed, sending death and destruction. The operator in Mexicali had been waiting for this. The drone’s shells punctured Grumman’s F-35, a fragment of metal slicing into his back and severing several arteries.

  The air battle turned savage after that. American tac-lasers, flak and SAMs devoured hordes of Chinese drones. U.S. officers and men alike shouted in glee at their stations. Many of them pumped their fists, although a few wondered how much more ordnance the Chinese would keep pouring at them. This was just too bloody much and it was a sign of enemy wealth.

  Then enemy ARMs exploded a dozen American radar stations. In a matter of minutes, a half dozen more disappeared. The J-25s engaged the F-35s. There were too many Chinese, with more fuel and missiles. After twenty minutes, the F-35s were either dead or running away.

  Waiting Chinese bombers screamed in, released smart bombs and then flashed away along the ground. American C-RAM systems chugged steadily. Several times an explosion created a greater fireball as an enemy bomber plowed into the earth and ignited, sending a column of fire up into the night.

  Larger Chinese aircraft now fired air-to-ground missiles, flocks of them. The heavy missiles bored through flak, defensive explosions and screens of flechette clouds: tungsten particles that disintegrated many of the lethal cargoes. Half the missiles never made it to target. The others chewed up tac-laser sites, SAM launchers and radar installations. It was a bloody start to a savage attack, as the Chinese refused to quit and just kept on coming.

  Because of this, more Chinese cruise missiles made it through the defensive belt than might have otherwise, even as they died. The enemy mass swamped the American defenses, overwhelmed it and poured through in sickening numbers, raining death and destruction, and bringing shock and awe.

  It was then the first Blue Swan missile arrived. Like a cruise missile, it flew nap-of-the-earth, over hills, through valleys and scraping treetops. Its onboard sensors and AI allowed it to avoid nearby enemy defenses, aided by defensive chaff and decoys and through plain speed when it could.

  In a few places, the air battle still raged hot above the destruction, although the Americans had seriously dwindled in number. In its flight, the Blue Swan missile passed burning anti-air installations and a damaged radar site.

  Then one of the American AWACS two hundred miles away bounced a radar beam off it. The missile was of especially stealthy construction, however, and the faint return signal wasn’t enough for the AWACS’ computers. Six and a half miles later, a powerful ground-based American radar station in Escondido located the advancing missile.

  Two SAMs left their launchers, accelerating to Mach 7. If they had launched sooner, they might have reached the Blue Swan missile. Maybe. The fact was they failed to reach it in time. Three miles into the border, over Fourth Corps of the American Sixth Army, the Blue Swan warhead exploded.

  Everything worked perfectly inside the warhead core—the missile had been manufactured and tested in Tokyo, Japan. A massive electromagnetic pulse blew outward from it, radiating like an exploding sun. The pulse washed over American minefields, over artillery, mortar tubes, troops, thousands of computers, hundreds of tanks, Strykers, IFVs, a veritable host of electronic equipment. The EMP also struck nearby drones, fighters and bombers. It even reached a following Blue Swan, incapacitating the missile so it plunged into a hill and disintegrated. The latest technological marvel wrecked masses of American equipment and weapons systems, and it took a bite out of Chinese air assets.

  The single Blue Swan missile created confusion everywhere, on both sides, on and behind the battlefield. But it wasn’t over. There were more Blue Swan missiles on the way.

  The Americans couldn’t know it yet—they might never learn, in fact—but five commando teams had succeeded in destroying their targeted missiles. The rest of the teams died, some attacking the wrong site, usually dying in the process, or they never made it through the Chinese air defenses. Their helos became junk, the commandos gory chunks of meat. It was a bloodbath of lost commando teams and lost equipment.

  But the five destroyed Blue Swan missiles were only part of the damage. The fact of the attack did more than the five teams achieved individually. In the haste and confusion of the night launch, three Chinese technician teams blew up their own missiles. Improper launch timing meant that Chinese EMP rendered two other missiles incapable, while American ground-to-air defenses shot down four more.
That was not counting the five missiles that simply failed to work as advertised. For one reason or another—a faulty component, incorrect computations or a malfunctioning AI—five missiles never detonated or never even made it near their targets.

  That left a paltry six Blue Swans. Those six created unprecedented damage, chaos and confusion. In the radius of the EMP, air and a great deal of ground equipment and mines simply ceased functioning, with their electronics fused or burned out.

  Both Chinese and American air took appalling losses as drones, fighters and bombers plummeted, crashing, crumbling and igniting as they struck ground. Several explosions started forest fires.

  Amid the burning radar stations and the dying tac-laser casements and SAM locations, the SoCal border defenses had electronic gaps. They were black holes where nothing electrical worked: cell phones, dead; radar, dead; vehicle starters, dead; tank systems, dead; artillery sighting equipment, dead, all dead and useless junk now.

  These “black-hole” gaps were uneven in nature. Two Blue Swan missiles had exploded near each other, making it the largest dead zone. One other missile EMP yield was low, while another had caused three times as much radiation as expected.

  In the majority of the SoCal Fortifications, the electronics were shielded well enough to work normally. In others, panic and confusion had already begun. Soldiers there wondered if the end had come. What was going on? Why couldn’t they talk to anyone and why had their equipment simply died?

  Those six Blue Swan missiles initiated the first phase of the great Chinese assault into California. It was less than Marshal Nung would have wanted but much more than President Sims could accept. Whether it was a success or a failure was still to be determined by the second phase about to begin in several hours.

  -6-

  The SoCal Fortifications